Quotes About Belonging

Anam is the Irish word for "soul" and ?ara is the word for "friend." In the Anam-?ara friendship, you were joined in an ancient way with the friend of your soul. This was a bond that neither space nor time could damage. The friendship awakened an eternal echo in the hearts of the friends; they entered into a circle of intimate belonging with each other. The Anam-?ara friendship afforded a spiritual space to all the other longings of the human heart.

Our hunger to belong is the longing to find a bridge across the distance from isolation to intimacy. Every one longs for intimacy and dreams of a nest of belonging in which one is embraced, seen, and loved. Something within each of us cries out for belonging. We can have all the world has to offer in terms of status, achievement, and possessions. Yet without a sense of belonging it all seems empty and pointless.

We have fallen out of belonging. Consequently, when we stand before crucial thresholds in our lives, we have no rituals to protect, encourage, and guide us as we cross over into the unknown.

There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. When we fix or locate them definitively, we injure our growth. It is an interesting imaginative exercise to interchange them: to consider what is near as distant and to consider the distant as intimate.

Life is full of magnetic interims that call what is separate and different to become one, to enter into the art and presence of belonging.

You travel certainly, in every sense of the word. But you take with you everything that you have been, just as the landscape stores up its own past. Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.

To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.

Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.

If you keep shining the neon light of analysis and accountability on the tender tissue of your belonging, you make it parched and barren.

Only holiness will call people to listen now. And the work of holiness is not about perfection or niceness; it is about belonging, that sense of being in the Presence and through the quality of that belonging, the mild magnetic of implicating others in the Presence. This is not about forging a relationship with a distant God but about the realization that we are already within God.

There is a desperate hunger for belonging. People feel isolated and cut off. Perhaps this is why a whole nation can assemble around the images of celebrities. They have no acquaintance with these celebrities personally. They look at them from a distance and project all their longings onto them. When something happens to a celebrity, they feel as if it is happening to themselves. There is an acute need for the reawakening of the sense of community.

We have fallen out of belonging.

European nightmare – the delusional myth of one blood, one race, one people. And

I could live here," Del said. "No, you couldn't. You'd turn into a coot and hang out at the general store, with your fly down," Lucas said. "You'd be known for goosing middle-aged women. You'd be the town embarrassment.

I didn't choose the Nerd Life. The Nerd Life chose me. Awkwardly and without making eye contact.

Part of what makes us human is what we mean to other people, and what people mean to us. I miss meaning something to someone, having that part of being human.

Well, I miss my wife, you know, I said. But I also miss the feeling of, I don't know, comfort. The sense you're where you're supposed to be, with someone you're supposed to be with.

In politics as in high school, who you are is to a large extent defined by who you sit with at lunch, and there was no doubt about it, the Earth was sitting at the loser table. It was not, Bob Pope thought, the true destiny of the Earth in our universe to be counted among the diplomatic equivalent of the acne-ridden and the furtively masturbating.

You say 'cure.' I hear 'you're not human enough.

What is it about being married you miss?" Alan asked. "Well, I miss my wife, you know," I said. "But I also miss the feeling of, I don't know, comfort. The sense you're where you're supposed to be, with someone you're supposed to be with.

Charlie's Homecoming

The sense you're where you're supposed to be, with someone you're supposed to be with.

No human is an island. They are rarely even peninsulas.

The quality of owning freezes you forever in I, and cuts you off forever from the we.